Are building costs still going up or finally coming down?

[Starryeyes1984]

We have just sold our house (in Warwickshire) with the hope of finding our forever home. Given our budget we're likely going to buy something that needs extending/renovating to create the space we're after. I know that building costs went up massively during covid but are the costs of materials and/or labour still going up? For example extending over a garage to create a bedroom and an en suite I would have thought would be £50-60k plus VAT but is this remotely realistic! I don't want to buy a house and then realise we'll never be able to afford to do it.

I’m not saying we don’t need immigration to plug gaps, we obviously do, but we should be trying to be self sufficient first, or at least have a proper workforce strategy to train tomorrow’s builders.
With getting people into building ( which is physically very tough so relatively a shortish career ) they should be well paid to compensate. They seem to be relatively wellish paid at the moment, though it’s always been cyclical.
When I was bricklaying, the old guys all basically gave the same advice, get out if you can. The wages then were barely higher than warehouse work.

@C4tastrophe the same could be said about many other worker groups- fruit pickers, nurses, doctors. The government would rather import them than train grassroots. This is because they work in 4 yearly cycles and need to deliver results within election cycles. It is also far cheaper to import in when at working age where the upbringing and training has been subsided by other country’s government. It is an economic decision for the government. However, trade prices are so high they are unaffordable now for most people to maintain their own homes. Either wages will need to increase far further to meet high wages or trades prices come down. That goes for many other areas in life too. One means that inflation continues to be rampant, the other means we will be in a severe recession. Both bad news for the majority of people

In my experience every British builder has been terrible. Lazy, half arsed job, not turning up for days. I try to go for Polish but they have mostly gone back. Romanians are really good, again only in my experience.